I think that with the "not in the public domain" statement Kilgard means to have attribution required. The FSF licensing lab's comments posted in comment #3 are about Kilgard's license clarification (strictly speaking even a relicensing, I think) in Debian's copyright file [1].

I believe Kilgard dislikes the GPL because it's (strong) copyleft. I thought I read a comment of his about that once, but I can't remember where.

I wonder if it would be possible for Kilgard to blanket relicense everything that bears his "/* This program is freely distributable without licensing fees and is provided without guarantee or warrantee expressed or implied. This program is -not- in the public domain. */" statement, in a similar way that the BSD license was changed. I suppose it's not possible to make such a change retro-active.

In any case, all-at-once relicensing as opposed to asking him about every single file or project would be a lot less hassle for everyone.

For the new license I was thinking more along the lines of the MIT license, which is more widely used than WTFPL.

I am not a lawyer (just a law student) so you should not take what I write as equivalent to a lawyer's advice, but here's my opinion:

The FSF Licensing Lab team is much more qualified than me, so I could be totally wrong here, but I am concerned that Mark may not have provided a free software license. While the source code is available and Mark has specified that the software is "freely distributable", I am very concerned by his statement that the software "is -not- in the public domain". That statement could be reasonably interpreted as expressing that aside from the freedom to distribute the software without licensing fees, other freedoms and rights one would have over explicitly "public domain" software are not to be granted to those who would use the software. Namely, the right to modify the software and distribute modified versions of the software.

The volunteer coordinators directed me to this issue and asked if relicensing the software without going through Mark is a possibility. I would say no. I understand Mark does not like the GPL (is that because it's copyleft?) and doesn't want to be bothered with free relicensing personally.

I would suggest that Mark be contacted and asked to reconsider his position. If he states that relicensing is too troublesome, I'd reccommend him choosing a simply written license, like the WTFPL.

If he still refuses to relicense, I would recommend removing his software from the gNewSense repositories.

After reviewing it, we do think that Mark has granted, in effect, a free software license, and the documentation in the Debian changelog provides notice of that. Obviously we’d prefer something a little more formal, but really, this isn’t any worse than some of the more esoteric free software licenses (like the WTFPL).

Please be careful not to read the notice any further than it goes. In particular: it only applies to what Mark wrote, and it only applies to whatever code of his existed in libglut when he sent his reply to Debian. Nothing anybody else wrote, and nothing that wasn’t in libglut at the time.